frankilin roosevelt

It's not about being liberal or conservative anymore y'all. That is a hype offered by the fascist whores who want to confuse the people with lies while they turn this country into an aristocratic police state. Some people will say anything to attain power and money. There is no such thing as the Liberal Media, but the Corporate media is very real.


Check out my old  Voice of the People page.


Gino Napoli
San Francisco, California
High School Math Teacher

jonsdarc@mindspring.com




Loyalty without truth
is a trail to tyranny.

a middle-aged
George Washington



ARCHIVES
1664 POSTS
LATEST ITEM

March 2024
February 2024
January 2024
December 2023
November 2023
October 2023
August 2023
July 2023
June 2023
April 2023
March 2023
February 2023
January 2023
December 2022
November 2022
October 2022
September 2022
August 2022
July 2022
May 2022
April 2022
February 2022
January 2022
November 2021
October 2021
September 2021
August 2021
July 2021
June 2021
May 2021
April 2021
March 2021
February 2021
January 2021
November 2020
October 2020
September 2020
August 2020
July 2020
June 2020
May 2020
April 2020
March 2020
February 2020
January 2020
December 2019
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019
June 2019
May 2019
April 2019
March 2019
February 2019
January 2019
December 2018
November 2018
October 2018
August 2018
July 2018
June 2018
May 2018
April 2018
December 2017
November 2017
October 2017
September 2017
June 2017
May 2017
April 2017
March 2017
February 2017
January 2017
December 2016
November 2016
September 2016
August 2016
May 2015
March 2015
February 2015
January 2015
December 2014
September 2014
August 2014
May 2014
March 2014
December 2013
November 2013
October 2013
August 2013
July 2013
June 2013
May 2013
April 2013
March 2013
February 2013
January 2013
December 2012
November 2012
October 2012
August 2012
July 2012
April 2012
March 2012
January 2012
December 2011
November 2011
October 2011
August 2011
July 2011
June 2011
January 2011
December 2010
November 2010
October 2010
August 2010
July 2010
March 2010
January 2010
December 2009
November 2009
August 2009
July 2009
March 2009
February 2009
January 2009
December 2008
November 2008
October 2008
September 2008
August 2008
July 2008
June 2008
May 2008
April 2008
March 2008
February 2008
January 2008
December 2007
November 2007
October 2007
September 2007
August 2007
July 2007
June 2007
May 2007
April 2007
February 2007
January 2007
December 2006
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
June 2006
April 2006
March 2006
February 2006
January 2006
December 2005
November 2005
October 2005
September 2005
August 2005
June 2005
May 2005
March 2005
February 2005
January 2005
December 2004
November 2004
October 2004
September 2004
August 2004

Sunday, 22 October 2006 at 20h 35m 39s

Bill Maher rips the stupidity of Think Tanks

Click here.

Bill Maher rips into the stupid predictions that never came true about the war in Iraq

If you're someone from one of these think tanks that dreamed up the Iraq War and who predicted that we'd be greeted as liberators, and that we wouldn't need a lot of troops, and that Iraqi oil would pay for the war, that the WMD's would be found, that the looting wasn't problematic, that the mission was accomplished, that the insurgency was in its last throes, that things would get better after the people voted, after the government was formed, after we got Saddam, after we got his kids, after we got Zarqawi, and that whole bloody mess wouldn't turn into a civil war ... you have to stop making predictions.


Thanks to CrooksandLiars.com for the footage.


Saturday, 21 October 2006 at 4h 24m 55s

The real John McCain

I used to respect John McCain. But now ... I realize he's just another craven politician.

Here is a snippet of his "strained" interview with (of all people) Chris Matthews ( of whom some people refer as Tweety) :

[SOURCE]


MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about an area where we‘ve all been involved, you especially, in talking about Iraq and how we can win this war or deal with it. You‘ve called, just in the last couple of days, for 100,000 more troops on top of the 140,000 we have as a compliment there.

When I read that on the clips this morning, I went to General Barry McCaffrey, whom you know so well, and he said we‘ve got only a total of 19 brigades that we could actually put into combat right now. We have 17 committed, two of those brigades to Afghanistan, 15 brigades already in Iraq. He says we simply don‘t have the capability to sustain another 100,000 troops in Iraq. You disagree?

MCCAIN: I said we need 100,000 more ...

MATTHEWS: Right.

MCCAIN: ...members of the Marines and the Army. We need additional troops there, but I think we need to expand the Army and the Marine Corps by 100,000 people.

MATTHEWS: More recruitment.

MCCAIN: I didn‘t say we need 100,000 -- more recruitment. And by the way, I‘m sure that people in this audience know the members—many members of the Iowa National Guard. They have served with courage, with bravery, with sacrifice and enormously wonderful performance. But it‘s a heavy strain on the Guard.

MATTHEWS: Would they please stand up? I know we have some here. Would the people of the National Guard of Iowa please just stand up nonofficially here? Thank you.

(APPLAUSE)

MATTHEWS: Thank you. Thank you for your service.

(APPLAUSE)

MCCAIN: Some of these young people have been to Afghanistan or Iraq two or three times already. We have put an enormous strain on them. They have performed magnificently, but we can‘t keep it up. We‘ve got to expand of the Marines. . . .

MATTHEWS: But why isn‘t it working? I mean, so few people here— we‘ve got a couple of thousand of young people here, and a very, very small percentage have expressed a commitment, even by standing here. Doesn‘t that mean we might have to think of the draft again?

MCCAIN: I don‘t think we need to think of the draft again because I don‘t think it makes sense in a whole variety of ways. But I guarantee you, if these young people felt that this nation was in a crisis and we asked them to serve, virtually every one of them would stand up because I have the greatest confidence in the young people of America.


So ... , uh, what the hell is John McCain saying? I think the picture above says everything ?


Saturday, 21 October 2006 at 4h 15m 46s

Holy Shit

Whoa baby look at what's happening now/

Baltimore Sun Source

Diebold Election Systems Inc. expressed alarm and state election officials contacted the FBI yesterday after a former legislator received an anonymous package containing what appears to be the computer code that ran Maryland's polls in 2004.

Cheryl C. Kagan, a longtime critic of Maryland's elections chief, says the fact that the computer disks were sent to her - along with an unsigned note criticizing the management of the state elections board - demonstrates that Maryland's voting system faces grave security threats.

. . .

The disclosure comes amid heightened concerns nationwide about the security of the November elections and the ability of the state to keep tight controls on the thousands of machines that will be used next month.

Maryland's September primary - which used voting machines and electronic check- in equipment made by Diebold - suffered a series of mistakes, and the outcomes of some contests were not known for weeks.


A legislator gets an anonymous package which proves that Diebold machines had preconceived intentions of fraud ?


Saturday, 21 October 2006 at 1h 57m 1s

My fears of the ignorance

I do hope we are all getting an education. I don't think many people read at all, and so what information they ever get is mostly from the video and audio media.

Imagine a people who have no idea what happened 30-40-50 much less 300 years ago. Much of history is something a whole hell of a lot of people have never even conceived of, except when alluded to by some external media source, or in conversation with other people. I mean if you don't know what happened in 1910 or 1804, what would you think about if you pondered it? What notions would fill the void of the empty receptacle?

This is hard for me to imagine because I have been reading since the age of 3. I was writing and drawing at age 5. I started playing guitar and piano in high school, and now, many years later ... I suppose I'm probably what you might call a child progidy.

But still, I know that other people are different, and frankly I am sometimes catatonic when I think of how little the average person reads in a month. I mean a lot of persons are vulnerable to the spin and propaganda, because they are just too ignorant too know any better. They often have good intentions, but like most human beings will get their hackles up and become quite defensive when challenged.

Now I'm not speaking of the bots and spin merchants who vomit all over the media and blogosphere. Those fools are just hybrid rodents chewing on their fingers.

God Save The Republic.


Friday, 20 October 2006 at 0h 36m 49s

Listen to yo grandma

I thought I'd share this with everyone.


We've been had.

We struck a match across the entire Middle East.

[We] not only failed, we created a civil war.

We did exactly what the British said we were doing, we fixed the facts around the policy because the President wanted to go to war.

They've been cut off at the pass, because they don't understand one thing : people fight for their country. I mean what else are they gonna do, where else are they gonna go.

We are only compounding the problem.

-- quotes from Helen Thomas, the David Bender show, 19 October 2006


I love Helen Thomas, the 80 something veteran journalist. Listen to your grandmother boys.


Thursday, 19 October 2006 at 3h 8m 29s

Progress is right around the next....

Bottomless pit of corruption.

This is the average hours of electricity in Baghdad from 2005 to 2006. Baghdad is a modern city of 10 million people. Prior to the invasion, there was an average of 16 to 24 hours of electricity per day.

[SOURCE]

And now ...


Tuesday, 17 October 2006 at 2h 55m 12s

Saving the elephant


Thanks to bartcop.com


Tuesday, 17 October 2006 at 0h 50m 46s

Paul Krugman today

I was just blogging about this event, and lo and behold, Paul Krugman mentions it too in his op-ed column today.


The current Congress has shown no inclination to investigate the Bush administration. Last year The Boston Globe offered an illuminating comparison: when Bill Clinton was president, the House took 140 hours of sworn testimony into whether Mr. Clinton had used the White House Christmas list to identify possible Democratic donors. But in 2004 and 2005, a House committee took only 12 hours of testimony on the abuses at Abu Ghraib.


Tuesday, 17 October 2006 at 0h 46m 44s

Hypocrites and conflicts of interest

Click here for the full story in the Houston Chronicle


WASHINGTON — Former FDA chief Lester Crawford has agreed to plead guilty to charges of failing to disclose a financial interest in PepsiCo Inc. and other firms regulated by his agency, his lawyer said Monday.

The Justice Department accused the former head of the Food and Drug Administration in court papers of falsely reporting that he had sold stock in companies when he continued holding shares in the firms governed by FDA rules.


Conflict of Interest is nothing new to the Rethuglicans. Louisiana Republican Billy Tauzin, left Congress and was hired for 7 figures as a lobbyist for a big Pharma medical lobby group -- just after he orchestrated the Medicare --cough cough -- Reform Act of 2004. Don't you think he got "pay back" ?

It's called the Government to Industry revolving door. After doing favorable things or making favorable interpretations of the law, one goes from being a congress person or government employee to getting hired at top dollar to be a consultant or lobbyist for the corporations and their lobby agencies.

Vice President Dick Cheney is the perfect example, where Cheney goes back and forth from private industry to government a number of times in 30 plus years time. It began in, of all places, the Nixon administration, continued as a consultant for the oil industry, then he was a congressman from Wyoming, then defense minister, then top CEO of Halliburton, and then finally Vice President. Granted this is a vast over-simplified timeline, but it works for the point I'm clarifying. If you want more info, you need to read.

Click here for a Mother Jones article that details some of the long sordid history of Cheney's travels through the revolving door. Click here for a list of various sources for more articles about Dick Cheney

Click here for plenty more examples.

Just like Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito both refused to recuse themselves before court cases even though they had blatant conflicts of interest. In Alito's case, he had investments with Liberty Financial at the same time the company was being litigated in his Massachusetts court. Scalia's son ( Eugene Scalia ) was appointed to direct a bureau of the labor department so he could gut worker safety rights after the 2000 election. The son Eugene "has said that employees should pay for their own safety equipment, when the equipment is required by law" ( source ). The father Antonin Scalia, spent the weekend hunting ducks with Dick Cheney one month before Scalia was to oversee the Cheney Energy Documents legal battle. Incidentally the case took an interesting turn. Click here to read the excellently written findlaw.com summary of events by John W. Dean.

Ask yourself, is it proper for the judge to spend a close personal bonding event hunting over the weekend with the defendent one month before the trial, and then attempt to exonerate that defendent? Scalia went ballistic when a reporter asked him this question, angrily defending his right to be impartial and having security take the reporter's camera away because Scalia didn't want digital evidence.

This is the man who is chief justice of the supreme court.

Now I remember when the Rethuglican's stromed the bastille when it was rumored that Lobbyists were buying access to the Christmas card list of the Clinton's White House (later proven untrue) or when the White House Travel Office was seen as "graft ridden" or (according to Wikipedia )


The White House Travel Office is in the residential section of the White House, and as such, staffers serve strictly at the pleasure of the president. Historically, a change of administrations usually resulted in a brand new Travel Office staff. Despite the established presidential privilege of replacing staffers at will, Congressional Republicans alleged that friends of President Bill Clinton, including his cousin Catherine Cornelius, had engineered the firings in order to get the business for themselves.[1] The House Government Reform and Oversight Committee eventually launched an investigation into the White House Travel Office firings. After a three-year investigation, the Chair of the committee, Pennsylvania Republican William Clinger, accused the Clinton administration of having obstructed the committee's efforts to investigate the Travelgate scandal. [2] Clinger also challenged the White House access to Billy Dale's FBI records in the Filegate affair. [3] Ultimately, a president's right to staff his residential quarters with persons of his choosing prevailed and no grounds for legal action could be established.

Bill Clinton later described the allegations and investigation as "a fraud".[4]


Now these false accusations got splashed across the front-page of the corporate newspapers, but buried the eventual proof that there were no grounds for legal action in the back pages -- if ever mentioned at all. How can this be ? Don't we have a "free" press?

Sure we do, and a large multinational holding company that owns hundreds of media companies is free to do and print what it wants. It's just that ignorant people may be what the huge financial interests want. Right now, news media companies like newspapers and local television and radio are getting bought up and downsized so the mother holding company can suck more money and make more profits. If this diminishes the quality of news, so what. The monopoly on ad space still ensures lucrative ad sales, even if the circulation and audience shrinks. Excessive profits are more important than journalism.

A book I suggest to everyone about this rise of corporate consolidation in the news media is written by two 35 plus year veteran's of the Washington Post. It's called the News About the News. Get yourself a copy.

As for the recent wave of corruption due to conflicts of interest, how come these same Rethuglican's can't seem to apply the same vociferous indignation when it comes to actual illegal action by their own. Republican Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma actually says he's "outraged about the outrage" ?

Isn't that despicable?


Sunday, 15 October 2006 at 21h 58m 27s

John Murtha, shoots from the hip

John Murtha has op-ed in the Washington Post this weekend. Click here

Here is the last 30% of his heartfelt piece.

The United States is about to begin its fifth year of occupation and fighting in Iraq. That makes this war longer than U.S. participation in World Wars I and II, and longer than the Korean War and our own Civil War. With every year of occupation, our efforts to fight global terrorism and our military's readiness to fight future wars have further deteriorated, along with our standing in the world. Meanwhile, the radical Islamic cause wins more and more recruits.

Despite the presence of more than 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, 23,000 Americans injured or killed, tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths and the expenditure of nearly a half a trillion dollars, here are the dismal results:

In September, 776 U.S troops were wounded in Iraq, the highest monthly toll in more than two years.

Over the past year, the number of attacks against U.S. personnel has doubled, rising from 400 to more than 800 per week.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, recently acknowledged that sectarian violence has replaced the insurgency as the single biggest threat to Iraq.

In the past two months, 6,000 Iraqis died, more than in the first year of the war.

Last week, electricity output averaged 2.4 hours per day in Baghdad and 10.4 hours nationwide -- 7 percent less than in the same period in 2005.

A Sept. 27 World Public Opinion poll indicated that 91 percent of Iraqi Sunnis and 74 percent of Iraqi Shiites want the Iraqi government to ask U.S.- led forces to withdraw within a year. Ninety-seven percent of Sunnis and 82 percent of Shiites said that the U.S. military presence is "provoking more conflict than it is preventing." And Iraqi support for attacks against U.S.-led forces has increased sharply over the past few months, from 47 percent to 61 percent.

Now, Karl Rove may call me a defeatist, but can anyone living in the real world deny that these statistics are heading in the wrong direction? Yet despite this bleak record of performance, the president continues to stand by his team of failed architects, preferring to prop them up instead of demanding accountability.

Democrats are fighting a war on two fronts: One is combating the spin and intimidation that defines this administration. The other is fighting to change course, to do things better, to substitute smart, disciplined strategy for dogma and denial in Iraq.

That's not defeatism. That's our duty.





GOTO THE NEXT 10 COLUMNS